McCain Scores with TV Viewers

If members of Team McCain weren’t NFL fans before, last night’s record ratings for John McCain’s acceptance speech would certainly turn them converts.

Thanks in part to NBC, which threw to its convention coverage directly after the end of the first NFL regular season game (between the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins), 38.9 million people watched McCain give his acceptance speech, Nielsen Media Research reported this afternoon.

Almost 600,000 more people tuned into McCain’s speech at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul than watched Barack Obama at Invesco Field in Denver last Thursday, Nielsen said. Obama drew 38.4 million viewers, which was at the time a new record for convention speeches.

Interestingly, about 4.2 million Hispanic viewers tuned in last night, compared to 1.4 million the night before, when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gave a rousing speech to accept the vice presidential nomination. African-American viewership remained stable, however, with about 3 million viewers tuning in. That’s less than half the number than tuned in to watch Obama speak last week.

PBS viewers are not counted in Nielsen’s numbers but the public broadcaster estimated about 2.7 million viewers tuned in last night (compared to 3.5 million for Obama’s speech). If you were to add PBS’s estimated viewers into the mix, Obama slightly beat out McCain’s speech, 41.9 million to 41.6 million viewers.

Since Nielsen’s numbers don’t include PBS or C-SPAN viewers, comparisons are slightly subjective. Either way, both conventions drew an historic number of viewers, according to Nielsen’s data.

Until this year, the most-watched Democratic convention happened in 1980, when 20.7 million homes tuned in to watch Jimmy Carter give his acceptance speech,Nielsen says. The most watched Republican convention until this year was 1976, when Gerald Ford accepted the nomination.

This year, average viewership of the Democratic convention rose 48 percent compared to four years ago, to 30.2 million viewers. Average viewership of the Republican convention (which was only three days compared to four days for Democrats) was up 52 percent from 2004 to 34.5 million.

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